Emails

Jeff Bezos Can’t Quit Ghosting Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth Paltrow was at SXSW this week in the service of her company, Goop. There, speaking with CNN anchor Poppy Harlow on Monday morning, she told an audience of the time she was ghosted by Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos, newly minted gossip fixture and power bald.

“In The Wall Street Journal, they asked me about my mentors, like you have, and I said, ‘Oh sometimes I, like, cold call people,’ and they said, ‘Well, has anyone not called you back?’ And I said, ‘Yes, Jeff Bezos,’” she started her woeful tale.

Wait a second. Famous, wealthy people with excellent muscle articulation just e-mail each other and set up a coffee? You can just have the confidence and the access to do that? But cold e-mailing Bezos is actually a normal person thing. See, in 2015, after a searing New York Times story on Amazon’s corporate culture, Bezos wrote an internal e-mail in which he encouraged employees with concerns to e-mail him at jeff@amazon.com. The e-mail was eventually published externally as well, so in addition to employees and Paltrows, customers could reach him at the same address.

After that, you’d expect Bezos to have gotten overwhelmed, and have a low-level someone else deal with them. Wrong again! He reads them. Or “most” of them. “I see most of those e-mails,” he told an audience at the George Bush Presidential Center just last April, during a panel. “I see them and I forward them to the executives in charge of the area with a question mark. It’s shorthand [for], ‘Can you look into this?’ ‘Why is this happening?’”

So, surely Paltrow’s reply to his reply came through. So to whom did he forward her missive to with a question mark as if to say, “Why is this happening?” That’s perhaps the biggest mystery here, and we’ll likely never know, but anyway, she didn’t get an answer at that time. Instead, the WSJ Magazine article came out in December 2018, and their non-exchange got written up here and there, obviously. (Which celebrities even name names anymore, but Paltrow? Bless her.) Allow Paltrow to take it from here: “I got an e-mail and the subject was ‘Jeff Bezos.’ And the sender was Jeff Bezos! The body of the e-mail said, ‘Hi there Gwyneth, The Wall Street Journal told me you wanna talk to me.’ So, I wrote him back and then he wrote me and then I said, ‘I would die for the opportunity to sit down and ask you a bunch of questions’ . . . and he never wrote me back.” Twice ignored. Twice scorned. Of course, Bezos’s life got a little complicated around that time, so perhaps it was not her, it was him.

Is ghosting in the business sector the same as relationship ghosting, or do we need another word for it? Like automating the relationship? Is that something? Like, you set it and forget it or . . . something? What about warehousing? Like, you shelve the networking for another, more convenient time? I’ll workshop this, maybe, but whatever Paltrow is doing is fascinating. Using the press—however unintentionally—as her means of sending a “Just following up!” e-mail is not something any normal person can do. And that’s how Paltrow once again managed to out-Paltrow everyone else—or at least everyone e-mailing jeff@amazon.com.

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